Mr Briggs' Hat by Kate Colquhoun: review

Kate Colquhoun's talents as a writer and historian turn a curious muder case
into a fascinatingly quirky portrait of the underside of Victorian London,
says Miranda Seymour.

By Miranda Seymour

3:43PM BST 28 Apr 2011

On July 9 1864, after an early supper at the Peckham home of his favourite niece, Mr Thomas Briggs, an old, flawlessly dull banker, entered one of the four-seater closed compartments of a train bound for his sedate suburban home in Hackney. Here, early in the morning of the following day, a detective brought shocking news to Mr Briggs’s anxious wife and daughter. By the evening of July 10, Britain’s newspapers were ablaze with a story that drove all others – and this was at the height of the American Civil War – into the shadows.

Mr Briggs' Hat by Kate Colquhoun

The violent murder of Thomas Briggs – the scene is described with compelling authenticity in Kate Colquhoun’s opening pages – disturbed people on several counts.

It troubled them that a man so eminently undistinguished as Briggs could be killed for nothing more than a gold watch and a silk topper (the murderer had forgetfully dropped his own soft hat, of the kind later favoured by Churchill, at the scene of the crime). It alarmed them, reading about the extreme violence of the attack – blood had spurted through the windows of adjoining carriages as Briggs’s body was thrust out of the train – to contemplate such savagery. It terrified them to imagine the familiar but confined setting in which the attack had been launched.

Britain’s first railway murder gave the press a field day. The 1860s, as Colquhoun reminds us, was the decade of the sensation novel; W H Smith’s brand-new railway bookstalls were among the most successful outlets for lurid tales of evil deeds in domestic settings. “Morbid, hideous and delicious” was the account given of the genre by Mrs Braddon, the richly rewarded author of Lady Audley’s Secret; now, with the gory murder of a gentleman in the calm surroundings of a first-class rail compartment, reality gained a chance to outshine fiction.

The Daily Telegraph was among the first to spot a good story and make the most of it. If a man could be murdered in broad daylight on a London train, what juicier terrors may lie in store? Gleefully, the paper invited pious readers to imagine being “slain in our pew at church” or, quite as improbably, “assassinated at our dinner table”.

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Readers of the cheaper weekend rags were invited to contemplate, over their amply piled breakfast table, the details of a “foul and brutal crime… the most horrible… ever to disgrace this country”. Colquhoun doesn’t tell us whether the rehashed and vamped-up accounts of Briggs’s bloody death did more for newspaper circulation than the faraway horrors of America’s Civil War. The answer, sadly, isn’t hard to guess.

The life lately led by kindly, decent Mr Briggs – a man as conventional as the black rolled umbrella carried by every City gent of the time – offered little nourishment to the hungry reporters and their masters. News that the murderer had been identified – and that an ambitious young London detective was currently pursuing him, by steamship, to New York – promised welcome enlivenment.

Surely, Briggs’s assassin would prove as delightfully brutal as any sensation-novel addict could expect: sandy whiskers and a look of brooding violence had been mentioned. News that the suspect was a foreigner increased his charms. Franz Muller, a German tailor, seems still, 150 years later, an unlikely criminal. The evidence against him, however, was strong.

A pawnbroker (called, wonderfully, John Death) connected Muller’s appearance and accent to the man who had sold him Briggs’s watch and chain. A cabman who shared the suspect’s fondness for smart headgear linked Muller, by its distinctive striped lining, to the crumpled black hat abandoned at the crime scene.

In every respect other than these two damning details, Muller looked like a victim. Small, neat, and eager (uncharacteristically for foreigners at the time) to be tried only by Englishmen, the tailor was invariably courteous and friendly. He loved reading The Pickwick Papers and David Copperfield. He attended church regularly. He flushed when offered, in the witness box, the small kindness of a chair. Convicted, rather briskly, by his English jury, Muller wept. He continued, until the last, to maintain that he was innocent and that he had evidence to prove it.

The promised evidence never emerged. In November 1864, four months after the murder of Thomas Briggs, Franz Muller was hanged – in public, as was the practice of the time. More than 50,000 thronged up Ludgate Hill to drink ginger pop, eat pies and raise a cheer for his (not especially swift) death.

Was the tailor guilty? This – without spoiling the story for readers – is the sole narrative device on which Mr Briggs’ Hat relies to hold the reader’s interest. Alone, it would be insufficient. Conscious of the problem, Colquhoun marshals her main events (the murder, the pursuit by ship, the court case, the hanging).

Each stage in the murder case is interconnected by passages of the enthralling – and always relevant – social detail at which this gifted writer excels. Deploying her skill as a historian, Colquhoun turns a single curious murder case into a fascinatingly quirky portrait of the underside of mid-Victorian London. I found it unputdownable.